JOURNAL OF GENOCIDE RESEARCH 9 and changes to citizenship laws in 1982 and their enforcement after.46 Yet many analyses, as well as testimony from survivors and others, point to the year 2012 as a moment of trans­ formation.47 How past violence helped facilitate the escalations that occurred after 2012 thus needs to be better understood, along with changes to the conditions under which Rohingya made their lives. Rohingya and other local residents of the region, for example, had also coexisted with relative quietude, if not peace, maintaining relationships of mutual dependence and even close personal ties.48 They had also been able to pursue their livelihoods, access limited humanitarian support, and even imagine individual and collective futures in Myanmar.49 This section argues that any adequate understanding of these transformations must include attention to practices of in-group policing. Many of the examples below include the use of Facebook, and the section that follows analyzes the difference that this made. In June 2012, for example, organized groups of civilians, supported by state security forces, attacked Rohingya and other Muslims in the capital of Rakhine State, Sittwe, displa­ cing nearly the entire Muslim population of the city.50 By October 2012, when another large series of coordinated attacks were launched across central Rakhine State, more than 120,000 Muslims had been displaced into temporary camps and the lone remaining Muslim ward of Sittwe.51 Organized campaigns of in-group policing also developed 46 47 48 49 50 51 Elizabeth Rhoads, “Citizenship Denied, Deferred and Assumed: A Legal History of Racialized Citizenship in Myanmar,” Citizenship Studies 27, no. 1 (2023): 38–58; Nick Cheesman, “How in Myanmar ‘National Races’ Came to Surpass Citi­ zenship and Exclude Rohingya,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 47, no. 3 (2017): 461–83; Nyi Nyi Kyaw, “Unpacking the Presumed Statelessness of Rohingyas,” Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies 15, no. 3 (2017): 269–86. Zarni and Cowley argue both that the Rohingya faced decades of violence and that 2012 marked a transformation, when a “security grid” that encompassed nearly all aspects of Rohingya life in northern Rakhine State was expanded into central Rakhine State and its capital, Sittwe (2014, 726–7, 720, 712–3). The relationship between these points still needs to be developed (but see Francis Wade, “The Echoes of Israeli Apartheid in Myanmar,” The Nation, 22 March 2024). Two of the most authoritative investigations note that the genocide involved a transformation in prior conditions of coexistence between Rohingya and other residents of the region, though further analysis of how these transform­ ations were achieved and how they could have contributed to subsequent violence is still needed. See, IIFFMM, 172; Penny Green, Thomas MacManus, and Alicia de la Cour Venning, Countdown to Annihilation: Genocide in Myanmar (International State Crime Initiative, Queen Mary University of London, 2015), 48–9. Most accounts of Rohingya life in Myanmar have emphasized their status as victims. Yet while prior conditions should not be characterized as peaceful or just, that they were different and included relationships with non-Rohingya can be gleaned from memoirs and some other analyses. Prasse-Freeman, “Book Review: The Polyvocal Rohingya Story,” Asian Journal of Social Science 52, no. 1 (2024): 59–61; Kaamil Ahmed, I Feel No Peace: Rohingya Fleeing Over Seas & Rivers (London: Hurst, 2023); Shae Frydenlund and Wai Wai Nu, “From Mutual Aid to Charity: Violence and Women’s Changing Interethnic Relationships in Rakhine State,” in Waves of Upheaval in Myanmar: Gendered Transformations and Political Transitions, ed. Jenny Hedström and Elisabeth Olivius (Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, 2022), 201–21; Habiburahman and Sophie Ansel, First, They Erased Our Name: A Rohingya Speaks (Melbourne: Scribe, 2018). The next three paragraphs are based upon Schissler, “Genocidal divisions of labor: Enthusiasm and terror in the Holo­ caust and the Rohingya Genocide in Myanmar” (n.d.). For another analysis of events in Rakhine State that highlights the significance of processes like in-group policing, see Kyaw Zeyar Win, “Securitization of the Rohingya in Myanmar,” in Myanmar Transformed? People, Places and Politics, ed. Justine Chambers et al. (Singapore: ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Insti­ tute, 2018), 251–76. For documentation of the situation in Rakhine State during the 2012 violence and after, see IIFFMM; Amnesty International, ‘Caged without a Roof’: Apartheid in Myanmar’s Rakhine State (London, November 2017); Fortify Rights, Policies of Persecution: Ending Abusive State Policies Against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar (Bangkok, 25 February, 2014); Fortify Rights, ‘They Gave Them Long Swords’: Preparations for Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity Against Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine State, Myanmar (Bangkok, 19 July 2018); Green, MacManus, and de la Cour Venning, Countdown to Annihilation (2015); Human Rights Watch, ‘All You Can Do Is Pray’: Crimes Against Humanity and Ethnic Cleansing of Rohingya Muslims in Burma’s Arakan State (New York, April 2013); Human Rights Watch, ‘The Government Could Have Stopped This’: Sectarian Violence and Ensuing Abuses in Burma’s Arakan State (New York, August 2012). While Rohingya Muslims have been accorded a singular place in nationalist propaganda, Muslims who identified in other ways, such as of the ethnic group known as Kaman, were also attacked. On diverse Muslim identities in Rakhine